Soundscaping—the introduction of background sound in order to reduce speech intelligibility, increase speech privacy, and increase acoustical comfort—is increasingly incorporated into offices as a solution. One problem in designing an optimal soundscaping system relates to setting the proper masking levels. However, evaluating a soundscaping system's effectiveness in any particular space and/or understanding how to tune a soundscaping system has largely been subjective and based on general assumptions about the workplace. For example, soundscaping systems in the prior art have been tuned based on building usage (i.e., 9 am-5 pm working hours) or personnel placement (e.g., programmers who are quiet vs phone support personnel generating high speech noise). However, such assumptions may be incorrect or become outdated. Furthermore, all offices are unique with different floorplans and furniture which change the nature of distractions. Thus, basing a soundscaping system's effectiveness and tuning on such assumptions is non-optimal.
As a result, improved methods and apparatuses for soundscaping systems are needed.